Contemporary Interventions Transform a Manhattan Aerie

It was an impossible space, the New York equivalent of one of those nearly vertical sites that challenge architects in the Hollywood Hills. This one started out as a studio and two one-bedroom apartments spread out over three levels at the top of one of the Upper West Side's most venerable, if eccentric, buildings. While it included the exotic enticement of a corner dome, as well as spectacular views and a tiny slice of the roof, the spaces didn't connect logically. Although the three apartments were being sold as a unit, there seemed to be almost no way to pull them together into something that would have the slightest bit of coherence, let alone grace.

Yet once the owner, an investment banker who lived nearby, had seen the trio of spaces, he couldn't get them out of his mind. "I'd always admired this building, but I wasn't even seriously looking for an apartment—I dashed in here one day to get out of the rain," he says. He waited out the storm looking at what the building had for sale, and when he first saw what was to become his apartment, "it was not a nice place," he recalls. "But I was taken by the dome and the views and the concept of having outdoor space, and I decided to make an offer." He was intrigued by the way the spaces were "not a box, not a place of right angles," and he sensed that something could be done to join the three small units into a viable whole. Since no one else seemed to see much potential in the place, it was not long before he ended up owning it.

He then had to figure out how to make it work. It was a piece of luck that a friend suggested he call Peter Stamberg and Paul Aferiat. The owner didn't know that Stamberg and Aferiat, architects who have practiced together in New York since the late eighties, have made something of a specialty of solving difficult spatial problems. A few years ago they created a graceful addition to a Richard Meier house in East Hampton that had seemed to resist change, and they have designed several apartments in which they resolved awkward layouts.

"What we saw were tiny, claustrophobic rooms—the inside of the dome felt like an igloo," says Stamberg. "As spectacular as it looks from the outside, these spaces were intended to be servants' quarters. But our client had the foresight to see what it could be."

The architects understood from the beginning that nothing they could do would give this residence the Beaux Arts grandeur, the sweeping flow of sumptuous rooms, that characterizes the best apartments on the lower floors of the building. The space was going to be quirky no matter what they did to it. Their challenge was to tame its quirkiness, to make it pleasurable rather than irritating, and to open it up to take advantage of the skyline views and the potential of the area inside the dome.

Stamberg and Aferiat began on the lowest level, which contained the tiny studio. It possessed the only large windows in the apartment and excellent views toward Central Park, but little else. All the other spaces, including the dome, were upstairs, either directly above this room or offset from it on top of the apartment next door. The problem of what to do with this first room was made harder still by the fact that some of it had to be sacrificed for a staircase, and at first the architects thought it wasn't suitable to be much more than an entrance hall. But by carefully rearranging the front door and positioning the stair beside it, Stamberg and Aferiat managed to give the owner a study, complete with built-in shelving and seating areas, and a small guest bath.

"When our client first saw this room with us, he stood where his desk is now and said he dreamed of being able to work here and have this view," says Aferiat.

Locating the staircase was more than a matter of careful positioning, since the corner of the floor slab that Stamberg and Aferiat needed to cut through turned out to have no support, and a new steel structure had to be designed and hung from the roof. Once the lower level and the staircase were set, however, the order of the apartment began to become clear to both the architects and the client. They agreed that the main living room belonged beneath the dome, but on which floor? In the original warren of servants' rooms, the area under the dome had been sliced horizontally, so that there was one small, cylindrical room on the level above the entrance and then another one above that, the space Stamberg thought resembled an igloo. Both rooms were cramped, and the architects credit their client with seeing from the beginning that the only sensible solution would be to remove the floor directly under the dome to turn the living room into a two-story loft. (The only remnant of the floor is a triangle of steel I-beams Stamberg and Aferiat designed to replace the original steel supports holding the dome in place.) The new room is more vertical than horizontal, but comfortably so, and it feels far more open. "Our client saw that once you knocked that floor out, it became a noble space," Stamberg says.

It is also an oddly inward-focused space, since at the lower level the solid wall is broken only by three small round windows. (There is a single window higher up, on what had been the upper floor, and since the building is a city landmark, cutting new windows through the façade was out of the question.) When you step up to the round windows, they offer splendid and unusual views, but there are no panoramas to be seen while lounging on the sofa. With its shape and its internal emphasis, the room seems almost womb-like—a place, paradoxically, to burrow in while perched high up in the cityscape.

Once the upper floor was taken away, the apartment became a duplex rather than a triplex—or almost a duplex. The roof was still one level above the living room, and it could be reached only through a door near the top of the dome, in line with the floor that had been removed. Stamberg and Aferiat now had to figure out some means of getting to it. Their solution was to keep the curving iron stair that had once led to the uppermost room and to rotate it slightly within the space so that it led directly to the roof door, beside which they added a wedge-shaped steel balcony as a landing. Together, the stair and the balcony provide a sculptural counterpoint to the dome. The balcony is a sharp arrow slicing into this vaulted space, a prow pointing directly toward the upper window that looks east to a vista of Central Park.

With the study on the lower level and the living room filling up the space inside the dome, it became easier to organize the rest of the apartment to fulfill the client's remaining needs: a large, open kitchen and dining area, which Stamberg and Aferiat placed in the center of the middle floor, more or less at the top of the stairs; a guest bedroom, which they put on the middle floor over the study; and the master bedroom, which they set beyond the kitchen, facing west, in an area that lacked the striking views of the rest of the apartment but made up for it in quiet and spaciousness.

The detailing throughout is modern, not only because of Stamberg and Aferiat's predilections—Aferiat has worked for both Charles Gwathmey and Richard Meier—but also because they wanted a clear distinction between their work and the original Beaux Arts shell. They saw no reason to pretend that the project was anything other than a drastic alteration, and they felt they could celebrate the original spaces best by showing how well the rooms could adapt to a new form of architectural existence.

Stamberg and Aferiat are also known for their use of intense, almost Fauvist colors, and here the owner asked for some limits. "I said I wasn't sure, since I have a very different color sensibility, but I really respected their design sense and their vision," he says. "I told them the thing I'd want most would be a deep golden hue." Stamberg and Aferiat complied with a rich, golden yellow, which they used only around the entrance and the staircase and above the dining table as a kind of river of color running through the center of the apartment. Most of the other walls are white.

"You have to have resources to do something like this apartment, but you also have to be intrepid," says Paul Aferiat. "But how often do you get a client who says, My program is simple—I just want to feel the potential of the space?' "

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (effective 1/2/2014) and Privacy Policy (effective 1/2/2014). Architectural Digest may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. Your California Privacy Rights (effective 1/2/2014). The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with prior written permission of Condé Nast.